Compact chip-scale guided cold atom gyrometers for inertial navigation: Enabling technologies and design study

TL;DR

This paper reviews the development of compact cold atom gyroscopes on chip-scale platforms, focusing on enabling technologies and design considerations for inertial navigation applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of enabling technologies and formalizes the design of an atom chip gyroscope with guided atoms for inertial sensing.

Findings

Identification of key enabling technologies for cold atom gyroscopes.

Design framework for an atom chip guided-atom gyroscope.

Analysis of noise sources and stability factors in the sensor.

Abstract

This work reviews the topic of rotation sensing with compact cold atom interferometers. A representative set of compact free-falling cold atom gyroscopes is considered because, in different respects, they establish a rotation-measurement reference for cold guided-atom technologies. This review first discusses enabling technologies relevant to a set of key functional building blocks of an atom chip-based compact inertial sensor with cold guided atoms. These functionalities concern the accurate and reproducible positioning of atoms to initiate a measurement cycle, the coherent momentum transfer to the atom wave packets, the suppression of propagation-induced decoherence due to potential roughness, on-chip detection, and vacuum dynamics because of its impact on sensor stability, which is due to the measurement dead time. Based on the existing enabling technologies, the design of an atom chip gyroscope with guided atoms is formalized using a design case that treats design elements such as guiding, fabrication, scale factor, rotation-rate sensitivity, spectral response, important noise sources, and sensor stability.